Head Open

It seems like no more than a day or two goes by without Harrison hearing some form of "Don't crack your head open" from me. "Don't climb on that or you'll crack your head open." "Get down from there, so you don't crack your head open." "If you don't stop jumping on that, you're going to crack your head open!" And so on. He even says it to me now when I warn him about a precarious physical activity in which he's engaging, saying, "Stop so I don't crack my head open, Mama?" To which I reply, "Yep." and explain, again, when he asks, again, that I don't want his head cracked open because I want him to take care of his big, beautiful brain.

My friends, today I think I saw some of that brain. Well, maybe not actual brain but I definitely saw more of the inside of my son's head than I ever cared to or thought I might see.

As you may recall, Tuesdays and I have not been friends this year. So it really doesn't surprise me that Harrison's first (please be the last, too, thanks) head cracking came on a Tuesday. It also doesn't surprise me that I got three hours of sleep last night, and while that's totally unrelated to Harrison's incident and worthy of its own blog post, it just seemed par for the course on this Tuesday morning of head trouble.

Sleep issues aside, we were set to have a decent morning. Ben was just getting ready for school and I was doing a great job of ignoring overlooking the screaming children as they chased each other around the house as I cleared the breakfast table. Quite honestly, my plan for the first half the morning was to get LT down for a nap and then snooze hang out with the big kids and some good ol' PBS before heading to the Children's Museum for our first Toddler Art class of the new school year, so I really didn't care that they were being loud and wild at the moment.

What I didn't appreciate was the fact that Harrison was running from Raegan with a toy in his hand for the sole purpose of annoying her, so when I first heard him crash and burn, my Snarky Mama voice wanted to throw out a "See?!" and a "I told you so" and even a "Dude, you totally deserved that" but then something made me stop and actually poke my head around the corner to check on him first. When you see a little guy with a hand pressed to his head, crying hard, Snarky Mama shuts up petty quickly. And when you go to remove his hand so you can check his head and see blood running everywhere, Snarky Mama disappears altogether and HOLY CRAP THE KID IS BLEEDING WHAT DO WE DO?! Mama steps in.

Thankfully Ben had just come back in the house to grab his bags, so he was able to hold HD while I got him cleaned up and we assessed the damage. Since no one saw what happened, our best guess is that the combination of his Angry Birds slippers and running on the hardwood floors, all while wearing PJ pants that really need to be hemmed all led to him wiping out. Unfortunately, when he did so, he slid into the corner of our cedar chest. Or maybe the base board. Or our kiddo rocking chair. I really don't know what he hit. All I know is that it must have been hard because it made a fairly deep dent in his forehead that gave me a view of things I didn't want to be viewing and is going to be one heck of a bruise before this is all said and done.

With the help of two Angry Birds band-aids, I was to get him patched up while Ben made some arrangements and then I took HD in to see the doctor ASAP. We knew it wasn't a long enough cut to be a total gusher that required the ER, but after I got him to the doc's, I was so glad we didn't just leave it up to the band-aids. The poor kid needed two stitches!

For such an active and typically squirmy guy, I have to give Harrison big props for how he handled the doctor's office. He sat so nicely on the exam table waiting for the numbing goop (like that fancy medical term? me too) to work and was great about having the stitches put in. We'll go back at the start of next week to have them removed and for now, he's loving the constant application of AB band-aids to his head and the fact that he doesn't have to do the first swimming lesson at preK tomorrow becasue for some reason, he's always been nervous about swimming days at school even though he always does great with them. In fact, after supper tonight, he made some comment about hurting his head so he wouldn't have to swim, at which point I had to remind him, "No, Buddy. You don't want to crack your head open just to sit out of swimming." See? Not even one day out from his first head wound and we're already warning about the next! Ahhh, me. Life with rough and tumble Littles!